My brother has a double major in psychology and CS, and I just have a CS degree. We both went to the same school, through the same CS program, had the same teachers, and his grades were substantially better than mine. He even entered the workforce about two years before I did. Eight years later, and I'm making nearly twice as much as him.
I live in NYC, whereas he's in Phoenix, he took a lot of options instead of salary, which didn't pan out, but he has a much bigger dwelling. I have an iPod and he has a Nomad. We're both pretty happy with what we got.
Within two years of graduating, to an employer, the philosophy degree will be two words on your resume. In the short run, the honors and your GPA will count for more, and an internship is the most likely to land you a job.
What matters most of all is enjoying your time learning in college before joining the rest of us on the 10-6 treadmill. The CS degree will keep your body alive. Philosophy might keep your soul from dying. Adorno did market research before becoming an academic. I know a guy who is splitting his time between teaching political theory at Hunter and doing web service security on Wall Street.
As for OSS development, it doesn't count as employment experience unless you're employed doing it. I look specifically for candidates with OSS skills when hiring because I assume that anyone who doesn't have them is just punching a clock. My employer (and all of Wall Street) is using OSS heavily, so it's necessary knowledge.
While contributing to a relevant OSS project would be a big plus, I'm happy to find people who are comfortable working with some of the OSS products I use and have a Linux box at home. Few candidates I've seen in the last three years have that much to offer, even at the senior level.
However, OSS development can count against you. Don't list a lot of time programming IRC clients or MUDs unless you're applying for a gaming or P2P job. I've seen this, and your resume gets passed around the office in a bad way. Tailor your experience to the job you want. Make sure that you're showing your employer that you're interested in what makes them money, not something else. Not that you shouldn't have outside interests or projects, but when you're applying for a job, you need to show that you're focused.
I worked with a guy that got a great job offer from NVidia straight out of college because he wrote an OSS translation layer between Voodoo's proprietary 3D API and OpenGL. I also knew a guy who was hired on at Be after he wrote a SCSI driver for the OS. In both those cases, they were essentially writing extensions to existing products for free.
I'm glad you mentioned the lack of randomness. I thought it was just me, or that maybe my iPod has specific tastes. I have a full 10G iPod, but the shuffle seems to start with the same four or five albums every time, even after reboots.
I'd like to see playlists that work by album. I hate building a playlist from albums and then trying to navigate the playlist by song.
I love the desert, and I spent 25 years growing up there, but I would not want to move back to Phoenix. The traffic is as bad as LA, and there isn't much to do aside from watch the same 8 movies shown simultaneously at all the theaters. The open space you mentioned is filled with identical sprawling suburban homes. Clubs are spread out and hard to get to without incurring a DUI. Bars close at 1a. You can pretty much forget art, and there are still a lot of bands that skip Phoenix. It's too hot to go outside 5 months out of the year. Plus, the low cost of living is reflected in low IT wages. My brother literally makes half of what I'm making with the same experience, and a lot of the IT work available is from behemoths like Honeywell, Intel, and Motorola. Tucson is slightly better, but it's smaller.
You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everyone its bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everyone can stand a hundred chest x-rays a year. They oughta have 'em too.
Ganesh Prasad commits all of the no-nos that give Open Source advocates a bad name:
1. He pits Open Source against Microsoft. Open Source software is judged on its own merits and doesn't exist to compete with Microsoft. Prasad consistently overstates the threat of.NET.
2. Prasad complains about $$$. Open Source is about freedom, not cheaping out on software. The sad thing is, he disses JBoss, which is a perfectly good Open Source application server, that has plenty of clout in its market niche. The certification issue is separate, and should be taken up elsewhere. Just because BEA and IBM can make some money off J2EE doesn't mean it's a failure. I'm using Orion and it works perfectly well. I'm moving to JBoss, which is even better. Those that pay more for their J2EE think they're getting their money's worth, and it's irrelevant to the Open Source argument.
3. He doesn't let Open Source sell itself. Prasad cites the myriad of Open Source Java applications, tools, implementations, IDEs, frameworks, and services as competition to Sun. Quite the opposite. These are complementary efforts. What Sun needs to see is that an Open Source process would allow Sun to take more advantage of these efforts to avoid duplication (log4j, mx4j) and provide shareholder value by easing up the drain on its own resources.
4. Prasad makes stuff up. Sun is obviously in a leadership position with Java. J2SE 1.5 proves it, and proves that Sun is staying on top of its competition. The whole notion that Sun is unaware of Ant is ridiculous and completely undermines his Open Source argument. Part of the beauty of Open Source is that complementary technology like Ant and Java can evolve in parallel with a minimum of formal interaction. Sun does not need to recognize Ant, since it's already universally recognized. His dimissal of Eclipse, a fabulous Open Source project backed by leaders in the Java community, is completely out of line. Eclipse fully supports Ant, is heavily integrated with Ant's build process, and can even generate Ant scripts. Prasad completely betrays his ignorace. As for XDoclet, J2SE 1.5 incorporates XDoclet-like features, and it's the beauty of Java's extensible and exposed documentation architecture that allowed it to exist in the first place.
It's unfortunate that his article was so widely circulated and so poorly thought out. There are plenty of good arguments for Sun to Open Source Java, and none of them were explored. Prasad needs to spend less time sniffing.NET glue.
His argument would also be weaker if he understood that he's denigrating JBoss, a quality Open Source application server, at the same time that he's promoting Open Sourcing Java. He's pushing Sun to make money with free products while complaining that commercial enterprise J2EE implementations cost too much. Which is it, is Open Source inherently better, or is it weak due to its "fledgeling commercial support organisation" and lack of "clout"?
Certifying JBoss is a separate issue that should be taken up elsewhere. JBoss fits well in its market niche, and obviously the players that want to spend $100k on WebLogic feel like they're getting some value for their investment.
The article overstates the threat of.NET, and really doesn't rely on the strengths of Open Source to sell it. The main one is that Sun could open up its developer base and take better advantage of academic programmers, talented hobbyists, and contributions from professionals in other organizations, with zero additional cost to its shareholders. The Java community isn't hurting for Open Source products that complement Java. There are compilers, JVMs, components like log4j and SWT, services like Tomcat, and IDEs like Eclipse. If Sun rolled over and died today, nearly all the pieces are there to put together a full Open Source implementation.
Sun needs to recognize that its strength is in leading Java, which wouldn't be diminished by Open Sourcing its implementation. In fact, the longer Sun holds onto Java, the more energy competitors (IBM) put into their own implementations.
Overall this article was shrill and counterproductive. I won't even get into the Ant rant (Eclipse has full Ant support and integration). The ideas in XDoclet are incorporated into 1.5. The author obviously doesn't know what he's talking about (browser based rich UIs?) and has spent way too much time sniffing.NET glue.
We also have freedom to vote for universal healthcare to reduce the total cost of human ownership for our corporate overlords, or other legislation to gently remind them of their obligations to the communities that foster them and frankly are civil enough not to raid their executive golf courses and steal their gold-plated trash cans.
Why is it that we have to acknowledge the freedom of corporations to screw us, as in offshoring, but we are never allowed the freedom to protect our best interests against economic priniples every bit as destructive, short-sighted, and totalitarian as Communism? Supply-side economics fell along with the Berlin wall in 91. Get over it.
Corporations are inherently anti-human, as their ultimate goal is profit, not human good. When corporations can use prison, sweatshop, or slave labor, as they do now when offshoring in China and Africa, they prove that out. When corporations have private armies that kill people to defend their oil operations in Africa, I'd say that's evil. As a human, I feel morally obligated to look at it that way, and it pretty well coincides with my best interests. Are you incorporated, and view yourself as a corporation first, human second?
And I suppose trespassers are to be shot on sight? I read a number of reports on this in the news, and I didn't see anything about the longshoremen being trespassers. Post a link if you know something I don't.
I saw people clubbed next to me in Times Square for no reason. I was there. Where were you, watching the protests on FOX? I wandered out
onto 42nd street after getting out of an optometrist's appointment, and I saw the cops charge a peaceful crowd and club everyone they could get their hands on. They were unprovoked.
They clubbed people who were obviously tourists who had just finished shopping and were trying to find the train. They clubbed everyone after charging at them and pressing them into a narrow walkway under scaffolding. The cops clubbed people because
they were nervous, not because anyone was breaking the law, rioting, or endangering anyone. It was
a pure act of aggression.
Take a look at the photos of the Oakland Longshoremen if you want to see what happens when you speak your mind. They were shot because
"protesters refused to move and some of them allegedly threw rocks and bolts". Note the key phrase "allegedly". The police shot longshoremen
who weren't even protesting. I guess being shot
by the police is about as "unlucky" as you get.
I've had the same experience. My daughter has grown up so far entirely without TV. She's watched it twice a year at her grandparents', and then only PBS. She didn't spend any time in preschool until she was 4, and she didn't really own any dresses util she was about 3. Until last year, her closest friends were boys. She's now nearly 6, and she's as girly as humanly possible.
Some of that is from her peers who are watching TV, but there really does seem to be a big divide in the way kids play. At home, where there is no pressure to conform to other kids, my daughter perfers nuture/manipulate activities to build/destruct-type play. She has all types of toys, except for weapons, and she has always preferred tea parties to smashing cars into each other. If anything, I've pushed her toward building since I'm incapable of doing the whole doll thing.
I'm actually a little sad to see the boys taking the backseat for what will probably be another six years. A lot of my good friends are parents of boys she knows from her preschool days, and they're starting to drift away.
It's really not the case that the "most artful practicitioners [sic] have isolated themselves". I went and saw Habermas on a panel a couple years back, and he filled a hall to capacity. A lot of people were turned away. Of course, once Habermas started speaking, people got up to leave, and by the end of the lecture, the hall was half empty. His English was pretty rough, so the terminology wasn't all to blame.
I know that Derrida packs the house the same way. The people at the top get rock-star treatment and get a lot of feedback from whoever comes out to greet them. There's an audience for it, and it's not all kids showing up for extra credit.
Actually, you can just throw out a news article just because it appears in the Post. In fact, most people throw out all the news articles that appear in the Post, along with everything else in the paper on a daily basis.
The Post should only be read in the proper context. You should find it abandoned on the seat next to you in the train or dig it out of the garbage. Then you should only read it if it has both the words naked and stabbed on the cover. Under no curcumstances should you read the op-ed pages.
You should only read the online edition if you saw the words naked and stabbed on the cover of someone else's paper while riding the train, and you just have to know who was naked and stabbed when you get to work. Under no circumstances should you email a link to an article, except to notify the next of kin.
I know a guy who works at the Post pretty well. He's bright, honest, left-leaning, and decent in every way. He works hard there, and he's worked there for a number of years. He tries to do a good job, and he tells great stories about his assignments. However, he's also incredibly sad. Just looking at him, you can tell that the Post takes a heavy toll on him.
I've been doing this with a combination of trplayer and vsound for Real media programs.
You can also buy content at audible. I've used them in the past, and it's a good service. If they supported Linux, I'd still be using them.
About two years ago, I bought a Sony CPJ-200 from eBay for about $600. It's a crappy projector, but it was about the only affordable projector when I got it.
Since I'm not experiencing any of the modern wonders of video projection, I thought I'd share some of the inherent strengths of projection viewing:
It's a much better experience for movies, since it really feels like sitting in a theater. I have young children, so my movie days are over. This has been a lifesaver.
At least with my projector, you can't watch it during the day. This keeps the kids from camping out in front of the thing. I don't have a TV tuner or cable, so it's for movies only.
The whole apparatus is out of the way. My apartment is tiny, and I don't really have room for a TV. It just wouldn't fit so that the couch would be in front of it. I have a ceiling-mounted screen, and when we want to watch a movie, I just pull it down. When we're done, it rolls up out of the way. The projector sits on a bookshelf over the couch. It really eliminates all the problems with incorporating a TV as a part of your furniture.
Since the projector is off most of the time, when I have friends over, we aren't all sitting on the couch staring forward into a TV, we actually face each other and talk.
I wouldn't recommend it for watching network programming, but for someone only watches movies, it's the ideal setup.
I recommended Debian for my company's development platform last year, and I'm now wishing I stayed with RedHat. Stable is hopelessly out of date, and the install is too difficult for junior desktop admins (windows admins) and developers to set up without my help (and I'm a developer, not an admin).
I need a stable release that evolves a few times a year, so that I can read reviews and decide when it's time to migrate to keep up to date. Debian only offers the choice between a year-old distribution several major releases out of date that nothing will compile on, and a testing release that moves on a daily basis, often jumping several versions back or eliminating a package entirely.
I also need a GUI installer, so I don't have to hold people's hands through the install. Nobody should ever have to use dselect, unless they're migrating from DOS.
The thing that upsets me the most about Debian is that the stable release is not always stable. The package for Galeon has been broken for a year now. The download manager for the Woody version crashes constantly, though the bug in Galeon was fixed well over a year ago. My choice now is between the unstable stable version and the completely unstable unstable version that stopped working entirely for me around 1.3.9 (yes I filed a Debian bug report). The testing version has since disappeared.
There have been numerous stable Galeon versions since last year on two separate branches, but I don't have an option to roll back to a useful version because stable is hosed and testing is gone. This ultimately caused me to give up on Galeon and just download the Firebird binary and install it by hand. So much for the wonders of apt-get.
Debian needs to either step up its glacial pace or make testing an honest milestone release before Perens starts touting it as an industry standard. I'm thankful there's still competition from organizations that put Linux usability over Open Source ideology.
Back in the day I bought a Casio EM500. It was a cheap PDA, it could run Mame, Doom, and Hexen pretty well, the screen was great, and the buttons worked for gaming (unlike the iPaq at the time). Two months ago I bought a Gameboy Advance SP. Here's why I bought a Gameboy rather than another PDA:
I didn't feel comfortable flashing the PDA on the train. It's a lot of $$$ to wave around.
I felt like I was destroying the PDA by using it. Though I was careful, I scratched the screen playing Pocket Slay. I can't stand using a PDA through a sheet of plastic, and at some point I pushed some grit around. When I played Mame games, I felt like I was going to kill the the buttons eventually. This is an unsettling feeling on a $300 device.
The buttons on most PDAs aren't really configured for gaming. They're normally all on the bottom in a row.
The PDA form factor is still pretty big, relative to the GBA SP, which is about the size of a big pager. When it's folded, it's pretty sturdy, so I don't have to worry so much about snapping it in half or cracking the screen.
Gameboy programming looks like a lot of fun. The architecture reminds me of the Amiga. It's a whole other world from writing games for the Pocket PC.
I found that I never used any of the PDA functionality of the PDA, no matter how hard I tried to incorporate it into my life.
The GBA SP only set me back $100. My Casio depreciated $200 in the space of two years. The GBA is likely to hold half its value for the next two years for a TCO of $50 versus $200 over the same period.
People stopped writing apps for the Casio's MIPS processor. That risk is still inherent in the Pocket PC world.
Needless to say, I'm happy with the GBA. There are some things I miss about the PDA, though.
It would be nice to have compressed video playback. That's not happening on the GBA.
I'm missing the ability to play NES games and other ported or emulated games. I think there's an NES emulator for GBA, but I don't have a flash cart setup.
There are very few strategy games for GBA. I'm playing Advance Wars 2, and it's a great game. It's unfortunate there aren't more like it. I may find myself playing Pokemon. The platform is really geared to the 8-12 set.
It has to be the absolute worst program for kids. I went through it when I was 14, and I learned how to make a product that nobody wants (puffy cloth picture frames) and endanger myself by selling it door-to-door after school. I don't let my kids sell anything. Kids should not shill for the man.
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My brother has a double major in psychology and CS, and I just have a CS degree. We both went to the same school, through the same CS program, had the same teachers, and his grades were substantially better than mine. He even entered the workforce about two years before I did. Eight years later, and I'm making nearly twice as much as him.
I live in NYC, whereas he's in Phoenix, he took a lot of options instead of salary, which didn't pan out, but he has a much bigger dwelling. I have an iPod and he has a Nomad. We're both pretty happy with what we got.
Within two years of graduating, to an employer, the philosophy degree will be two words on your resume. In the short run, the honors and your GPA will count for more, and an internship is the most likely to land you a job.
What matters most of all is enjoying your time learning in college before joining the rest of us on the 10-6 treadmill. The CS degree will keep your body alive. Philosophy might keep your soul from dying. Adorno did market research before becoming an academic. I know a guy who is splitting his time between teaching political theory at Hunter and doing web service security on Wall Street.
As for OSS development, it doesn't count as employment experience unless you're employed doing it. I look specifically for candidates with OSS skills when hiring because I assume that anyone who doesn't have them is just punching a clock. My employer (and all of Wall Street) is using OSS heavily, so it's necessary knowledge.
While contributing to a relevant OSS project would be a big plus, I'm happy to find people who are comfortable working with some of the OSS products I use and have a Linux box at home. Few candidates I've seen in the last three years have that much to offer, even at the senior level.
However, OSS development can count against you. Don't list a lot of time programming IRC clients or MUDs unless you're applying for a gaming or P2P job. I've seen this, and your resume gets passed around the office in a bad way. Tailor your experience to the job you want. Make sure that you're showing your employer that you're interested in what makes them money, not something else. Not that you shouldn't have outside interests or projects, but when you're applying for a job, you need to show that you're focused.
I worked with a guy that got a great job offer from NVidia straight out of college because he wrote an OSS translation layer between Voodoo's proprietary 3D API and OpenGL. I also knew a guy who was hired on at Be after he wrote a SCSI driver for the OS. In both those cases, they were essentially writing extensions to existing products for free.
Basically what you're saying is that America is going to be a "B" ship country.
I'd like to see playlists that work by album. I hate building a playlist from albums and then trying to navigate the playlist by song.
I love the desert, and I spent 25 years growing up there, but I would not want to move back to Phoenix. The traffic is as bad as LA, and there isn't much to do aside from watch the same 8 movies shown simultaneously at all the theaters. The open space you mentioned is filled with identical sprawling suburban homes. Clubs are spread out and hard to get to without incurring a DUI. Bars close at 1a. You can pretty much forget art, and there are still a lot of bands that skip Phoenix. It's too hot to go outside 5 months out of the year. Plus, the low cost of living is reflected in low IT wages. My brother literally makes half of what I'm making with the same experience, and a lot of the IT work available is from behemoths like Honeywell, Intel, and Motorola. Tucson is slightly better, but it's smaller.
You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everyone its bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everyone can stand a hundred chest x-rays a year. They oughta have 'em too.
This came up on /. in December.
Fortunately, many people regularly fail to shower, bathe, brush their teeth, wash dishes, or use the bathroom because of their PCs.
1. He pits Open Source against Microsoft. Open Source software is judged on its own merits and doesn't exist to compete with Microsoft. Prasad consistently overstates the threat of .NET.
2. Prasad complains about $$$. Open Source is about freedom, not cheaping out on software. The sad thing is, he disses JBoss, which is a perfectly good Open Source application server, that has plenty of clout in its market niche. The certification issue is separate, and should be taken up elsewhere. Just because BEA and IBM can make some money off J2EE doesn't mean it's a failure. I'm using Orion and it works perfectly well. I'm moving to JBoss, which is even better. Those that pay more for their J2EE think they're getting their money's worth, and it's irrelevant to the Open Source argument.
3. He doesn't let Open Source sell itself. Prasad cites the myriad of Open Source Java applications, tools, implementations, IDEs, frameworks, and services as competition to Sun. Quite the opposite. These are complementary efforts. What Sun needs to see is that an Open Source process would allow Sun to take more advantage of these efforts to avoid duplication (log4j, mx4j) and provide shareholder value by easing up the drain on its own resources.
4. Prasad makes stuff up. Sun is obviously in a leadership position with Java. J2SE 1.5 proves it, and proves that Sun is staying on top of its competition. The whole notion that Sun is unaware of Ant is ridiculous and completely undermines his Open Source argument. Part of the beauty of Open Source is that complementary technology like Ant and Java can evolve in parallel with a minimum of formal interaction. Sun does not need to recognize Ant, since it's already universally recognized. His dimissal of Eclipse, a fabulous Open Source project backed by leaders in the Java community, is completely out of line. Eclipse fully supports Ant, is heavily integrated with Ant's build process, and can even generate Ant scripts. Prasad completely betrays his ignorace. As for XDoclet, J2SE 1.5 incorporates XDoclet-like features, and it's the beauty of Java's extensible and exposed documentation architecture that allowed it to exist in the first place.
It's unfortunate that his article was so widely circulated and so poorly thought out. There are plenty of good arguments for Sun to Open Source Java, and none of them were explored. Prasad needs to spend less time sniffing .NET glue.
Certifying JBoss is a separate issue that should be taken up elsewhere. JBoss fits well in its market niche, and obviously the players that want to spend $100k on WebLogic feel like they're getting some value for their investment.
The article overstates the threat of .NET, and really doesn't rely on the strengths of Open Source to sell it. The main one is that Sun could open up its developer base and take better advantage of academic programmers, talented hobbyists, and contributions from professionals in other organizations, with zero additional cost to its shareholders. The Java community isn't hurting for Open Source products that complement Java. There are compilers, JVMs, components like log4j and SWT, services like Tomcat, and IDEs like Eclipse. If Sun rolled over and died today, nearly all the pieces are there to put together a full Open Source implementation.
Sun needs to recognize that its strength is in leading Java, which wouldn't be diminished by Open Sourcing its implementation. In fact, the longer Sun holds onto Java, the more energy competitors (IBM) put into their own implementations.
Overall this article was shrill and counterproductive. I won't even get into the Ant rant (Eclipse has full Ant support and integration). The ideas in XDoclet are incorporated into 1.5. The author obviously doesn't know what he's talking about (browser based rich UIs?) and has spent way too much time sniffing .NET glue.
"The next point is that many iBCS2 binaries will require shared libraries."
A lot of people used ibcs before Wine to run WordPerfect on Linux.Why is it that we have to acknowledge the freedom of corporations to screw us, as in offshoring, but we are never allowed the freedom to protect our best interests against economic priniples every bit as destructive, short-sighted, and totalitarian as Communism? Supply-side economics fell along with the Berlin wall in 91. Get over it.
Corporations are inherently anti-human, as their ultimate goal is profit, not human good. When corporations can use prison, sweatshop, or slave labor, as they do now when offshoring in China and Africa, they prove that out. When corporations have private armies that kill people to defend their oil operations in Africa, I'd say that's evil. As a human, I feel morally obligated to look at it that way, and it pretty well coincides with my best interests. Are you incorporated, and view yourself as a corporation first, human second?
And I suppose trespassers are to be shot on sight? I read a number of reports on this in the news, and I didn't see anything about the longshoremen being trespassers. Post a link if you know something I don't.
They clubbed people who were obviously tourists who had just finished shopping and were trying to find the train. They clubbed everyone after charging at them and pressing them into a narrow walkway under scaffolding. The cops clubbed people because they were nervous, not because anyone was breaking the law, rioting, or endangering anyone. It was a pure act of aggression.
Take a look at the photos of the Oakland Longshoremen if you want to see what happens when you speak your mind. They were shot because "protesters refused to move and some of them allegedly threw rocks and bolts". Note the key phrase "allegedly". The police shot longshoremen who weren't even protesting. I guess being shot by the police is about as "unlucky" as you get.
I'm running Firebird .7, Flash 6.0 r79, kernel 2.6, alsa-base .9.8-3, and debian testing. Sound is going through esd .2.29. I get garbled sound.
Some of that is from her peers who are watching TV, but there really does seem to be a big divide in the way kids play. At home, where there is no pressure to conform to other kids, my daughter perfers nuture/manipulate activities to build/destruct-type play. She has all types of toys, except for weapons, and she has always preferred tea parties to smashing cars into each other. If anything, I've pushed her toward building since I'm incapable of doing the whole doll thing.
I'm actually a little sad to see the boys taking the backseat for what will probably be another six years. A lot of my good friends are parents of boys she knows from her preschool days, and they're starting to drift away.
I know that Derrida packs the house the same way. The people at the top get rock-star treatment and get a lot of feedback from whoever comes out to greet them. There's an audience for it, and it's not all kids showing up for extra credit.
The Post should only be read in the proper context. You should find it abandoned on the seat next to you in the train or dig it out of the garbage. Then you should only read it if it has both the words naked and stabbed on the cover. Under no curcumstances should you read the op-ed pages.
You should only read the online edition if you saw the words naked and stabbed on the cover of someone else's paper while riding the train, and you just have to know who was naked and stabbed when you get to work. Under no circumstances should you email a link to an article, except to notify the next of kin.
I know a guy who works at the Post pretty well. He's bright, honest, left-leaning, and decent in every way. He works hard there, and he's worked there for a number of years. He tries to do a good job, and he tells great stories about his assignments. However, he's also incredibly sad. Just looking at him, you can tell that the Post takes a heavy toll on him.
I've been doing this with a combination of trplayer and vsound for Real media programs. You can also buy content at audible. I've used them in the past, and it's a good service. If they supported Linux, I'd still be using them.
Are you so sure? WinAmp 3.0 is on wine's silver list. 5.0 may only require msvcrt.dll as well. Has anyone tried it?
Since I'm not experiencing any of the modern wonders of video projection, I thought I'd share some of the inherent strengths of projection viewing:
I wouldn't recommend it for watching network programming, but for someone only watches movies, it's the ideal setup.
I need a stable release that evolves a few times a year, so that I can read reviews and decide when it's time to migrate to keep up to date. Debian only offers the choice between a year-old distribution several major releases out of date that nothing will compile on, and a testing release that moves on a daily basis, often jumping several versions back or eliminating a package entirely.
I also need a GUI installer, so I don't have to hold people's hands through the install. Nobody should ever have to use dselect, unless they're migrating from DOS.
The thing that upsets me the most about Debian is that the stable release is not always stable. The package for Galeon has been broken for a year now. The download manager for the Woody version crashes constantly, though the bug in Galeon was fixed well over a year ago. My choice now is between the unstable stable version and the completely unstable unstable version that stopped working entirely for me around 1.3.9 (yes I filed a Debian bug report). The testing version has since disappeared.
There have been numerous stable Galeon versions since last year on two separate branches, but I don't have an option to roll back to a useful version because stable is hosed and testing is gone. This ultimately caused me to give up on Galeon and just download the Firebird binary and install it by hand. So much for the wonders of apt-get.
Debian needs to either step up its glacial pace or make testing an honest milestone release before Perens starts touting it as an industry standard. I'm thankful there's still competition from organizations that put Linux usability over Open Source ideology.
Needless to say, I'm happy with the GBA. There are some things I miss about the PDA, though.
the Goat-Foot God?
It has to be the absolute worst program for kids. I went through it when I was 14, and I learned how to make a product that nobody wants (puffy cloth picture frames) and endanger myself by selling it door-to-door after school. I don't let my kids sell anything. Kids should not shill for the man.